It's hard to imagine a music event of any kind with a setting as beautiful as the one for the San Miguel Primavera Sound Festival. It takes place in Barcelona's winding Parc del Fòrum, a sleek and modern space that rolls down into the Mediterranean and offers striking views of the skyline. The Pitchfork Stage sits right on the edge of the sea. Performers can look out at yachts in a small marina and, beyond that, water that stretches to the horizon.

Purity Ring's music feels feels like it's constantly folding in on itself. Part of it is the fact that the considerable bottom end contains the most important musical information. The songs bend and flow along with the overwhelming bass thrusts, and sometimes Megan James' voice and the spare synth chirps Corin Roddick sprinkles on top are there only for decoration. With so much tied up in that churning lower octave, the music feels on the verge of imploding, a reaction to the outward energy of the seriously distressed subwoofer cabinets. But the group's easy way with melody keeps things on track, and helps them to split the difference between spooky post-Knife vocal manipulation and PacNW-style indie pop.

In a festival setting, they start with the same handicap as a group like High Places: only two people to fill the vast space, one of whom is anchored to a table full of gear. But they have some nice touches to offset this difficulty, including Roddick's colorful MIDI rig, which allows him to control bursts of percussion and samples by hitting an array of bulbs that light up in turn, giving you something to look at.

For her part, James isn't an especially energetic performer, but she does seem comfortable up there, pacing the stage, hitting her notes, and taking a moment to beat a bass drum to lend a bit of physicality to a show mostly borne of a circuit board. The crowd probably didn't know the majority of the songs from their forthcoming album, but during the latter part of the show they cheered loudly for "Ungirthed", which got a teasingly long and drawn-out intro.

Mazzy Star [Ray-Ban Stage; 9:50 p.m.]

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__Photo by Charlotte Zoller

Mazzy Star's music has loomed large over the past couple of years of indie rock. They made Lynchian music 20 years ago, back when we took David Lynch for granted and before Lynchian music was really a thing. Guitarist Dave Roback, an influential figure in the 1960s-psych-obsessed L.A.-based Paisley Underground scene that bubbled up in the 80s, wrote dark, folk-inflected melodies that perfectly suited singer Hope Sandoval's impossibly distant purr.

It's an open question how much people would still care about Mazzy Star if they'd kept going making a record every couple of years after 1996's Among My Swan. But they didn't, and in an age of musical saturation, sometimes absence makes the heart grow fonder. When they returned with a single last year and word of an album on the way, it seemed sensible to table the Widowspeaks and Tamaryns for a minute and return to the sad/slow/dream-core OGs.

One thing about Mazzy Star, though, is that you don't meet too many people who talk of having their minds blown at an early-90s show. Mazzy Star live is a subtle thing. The stage is kept dark and you can just barely see Sandoval. Whenever she wasn't singing, she turned around to look at the rest of the band, possibly looking for cues. They don't move around a whole lot. And many of their songs are shorter than you remember so that, when it seems like they're just settling into a groove, they suddenly stop.

Fortunately, the song selection was ace, the sound was excellent, and highlights were paid out evenly through the set. They opened with the mid-tempo "Blue Flower" from their 1990 debut She Hangs Brightly, and played my personal favorite from the same record, "Halah", just a few songs later. "Fade Into You" came mid-way through the set instead of being held for the end. They rocked convincingly on the Doors-like "Ghost Highway", and the foggy countrified numbers were augmented with pedal steel and Roback's slide.

I was just a few feet from the front, but as the set wore on I began to feel jealous of the people sitting some distance back on the steps that form the large amphitheater surrounding the stage. Mazzy Star make sit-down music and, in one sense, private music. The stuff of late nights in dark rooms rather than vast concerts in the open air.

Spiritualized [MINI Stage; 2:15 a.m.]

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__Photo by Erez Avissar

Jason Pierce of Spiritualized cuts an odd but surprisingly compelling figure onstage. He's clad head-to-toe in white and wears the wraparound shades that never seem to leave his head. He's slightly hunched over his microphone, like it takes just a bit too much energy to stand perfectly straight. When he reaches out to hit a guitar pedal, his movements are nothing if not efficient, getting the job done with a minimal amount of exertion. And he stands facing perpendicular to the audience, only allowing himself to turn in a 180-degree axis that never allows for full frontal contact with the masses there to see him. You can't really tell if he's enjoying himself or feeling miserable, but somehow that is all beside the point: this is what the man DOES, the thing that gives his life meaning. And his songs, both simple and grandiose, help listeners find meaning, too.

The band opened with "Hey Jane" from Sweet Heart Sweet Light, and it was brilliant. With two women singing backup and keyboards that generally leaned toward "church organ," it was an ideal mix of heaven-gazing gospel and psychedelic rock'n'roll thump. The peaks were many: "Walking With Jesus", "Soul on Fire", "Oh Baby", a gorgeous "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space".

This band was made for festivals. Spiritualized's music is infinitely scalable. The songs build from their quiet see-saw chords into epic howls against the absurdity of human suffering and death, and they can be pumped up to fill virtually any space. The contrast between Pierce's frailty and the sheer overwhelming volume perfectly mirrors the band's primary theme: the grasp for something larger and more significant in the face of human weakness.